Equivalence of Statistical Mechanical Ensembles for Non-Critical Quantum Systems

Abstract

We consider the problem of whether the canonical and microcanonical ensembles are locally equivalent for short-ranged quantum Hamiltonians of N spins arranged on a d-dimensional lattices. For any temperature for which the system has a finite correlation length, we prove that the canonical and microcanonical state are approximately equal on regions containing up to O(N^(1/(d+1))) spins. The proof rests on a variant of the Berry-Esseen theorem for quantum lattice systems and ideas from quantum information theory.